Artemis II Trajectory Simulation
Mike's pick this week is artemis2_trajectory_simulation by Jacob Honer.
Later this evening the Artemis II crew will splashdown back on Earth following a successful Lunar flyby. The mission has captured the imagination of the world including that of Jacob Horner, A PhD student at Michigan State University. In Jacob's own words:
"I used MATLAB to put together a 2D Earth-Moon mission simulation in MATLAB that recreates the high-level flow of an Artemis-style free-return trajectory: start in low Earth orbit, complete a parking orbit, perform translunar injection, make a small correction burn, swing around the far side of the Moon, and head back toward Earth.
The model uses a simplified planar gravity setup, numerical integration with ode45, and a search-and-optimization loop to tune the burns and trajectory until the flyby and return lined up the way I wanted. The GIF shows the full result.
Even for a simplified model like this, it takes a lot of iteration to get a trajectory to behave the way you want. Like many real-world problems, there often is no closed-form solution for the exact outcome you’re after, which is what makes numerical methods so important. That’s one reason I always try to emphasize them to my students: numerical methods are not just useful for one narrow class of problems, they are tools you can use for almost all computational problems!"
Jacob has made his code available on GitHub and when you run it, you'll get the animation shown below.
For more about Artemis II and MATLAB, check out my post from earlier in the week: NASA’s Artemis II mission and MATLAB.
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